Zelensky expects Russia's attacks on Ukraine to intensify during the EU summit this week

By Natalia Zinets and Max Hunder

KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy predicted Russia will escalate its assaults this 7 days as European Union leaders take into account whether or not to again Kyiv’s bid to sign up for the bloc and Moscow presses its campaign to earn command of the country’s east.

“Naturally, this week we must hope from Russia an intensification of its hostile things to do,” Zelenskiy stated in his Sunday nightly online video address. “We are making ready. We are completely ready.”

Ukraine used to join the EU 4 days immediately after Russian troops poured throughout its border in February. The EU’s executive, the European Commission, on Friday recommended that Ukraine get prospect position.

Leaders of the 27-country union will think about the question at a summit on Thursday and Friday and are expected to endorse Ukraine’s application despite misgivings from some member states. The method could acquire lots of years to full.

The EU’s embrace of Ukraine would interfere with one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mentioned ambitions when he ordered his troops into Ukraine: to hold Moscow’s southern neighbor exterior of the West’s sphere of influence.

Putin on Friday said Moscow had “almost nothing towards” Ukraine’s EU membership, but a Kremlin spokesperson explained Russia was carefully next Kyiv’s bid specially in gentle of amplified defense cooperation among member nations.

On the battlefield, Russian forces are attempting to choose finish manage of the japanese Donbas region, pieces of which have been now held by Russian-backed separatists right before the Feb. 24 invasion.

A key focus on of Moscow’s eastern assault is the industrial metropolis of Sievierodonetsk. Russia stated on Sunday it experienced seized Metyolkine, a village on the outskirts, and Russian point out information agency TASS described that numerous Ukrainian fighters experienced surrendered there. Ukraine’s armed service mentioned Russia experienced “partial success” in the region.

Luhansk Governor Serhiy Gaidai advised Ukrainian Television that a Russian attack on Toshkivka, 35 km (20 miles) south of Sievierodonetsk, also “had a degree of good results.”

In Sievierodonetsk by itself, a town of 100,000 before the war, Gaidai claimed Russia managed “the key portion” but not the total town after extreme fighting. Reuters could not independently validate the battlefield accounts.

Both Russia and Ukraine have ongoing weighty bombardment all-around Sievierodonetsk “with minor adjust to the entrance line”, Britain’s Ministry of Defence explained on Sunday.

In Sievierodonetsk’s twin city of Lysychansk, household properties and personal houses had been ruined by Russian shelling, Gaidai said. “People are dying on the streets and in bomb shelters,” he extra.

He afterwards reported 19 folks experienced been evacuated on Sunday. “We are managing to carry in humanitarian aid and evacuate persons as greatest we can,” Gaidai stated.

‘WAR COULD Very last YEARS’

Analysts at the Institute for the Research of War, a Washington-based mostly assume tank, wrote in a be aware that “Russian forces will likely be able to seize Sievierodonetsk in the coming weeks, but at the cost of concentrating most of their offered forces in this modest spot.”

NATO Secretary-Typical Jens Stoltenberg stated the Ukraine conflict could final for yrs and urged Western governments to keep on sending condition-of-the-art weaponry to Ukrainian troops, Germany’s Bild am Sonntag newspaper described.

“We need to get ready for the reality that it could get decades. We ought to not allow up in supporting Ukraine,” Stoltenberg was quoted as saying.

Russia has stated it introduced what it phone calls a “exclusive military services procedure” to disarm its neighbour and shield Russian speakers there from dangerous nationalists. Kyiv and its allies dismiss that as a baseless pretext for a war of aggression.

The British armed service evaluation claimed morale for Ukrainian and Russian battle units in the Donbas was most likely “variable.”

“Ukrainian forces have probably endured desertions in modern months, on the other hand, Russian morale hugely possible stays specifically troubled. Instances of entire Russian models refusing orders and armed stand-offs among officers and their troops keep on to take place,” the British Ministry of Defence reported on Twitter.

In Ukraine’s 2nd-greatest city Kharkiv, northwest of Luhansk, Russia’s defence ministry stated its Iskander missiles experienced ruined weaponry not too long ago equipped by Western nations.

Russian forces ended up seeking to method Kharkiv, which experienced intense shelling earlier in the war, and convert it into a “frontline city”, a Ukrainian inside ministry official said.

In southern Ukraine, Western weaponry had served Ukrainian forces progress 10 km (6 miles) to Russian-occupied Melitopol, its mayor explained in a video posted on Telegram from exterior the town.

An EU final decision in favor of Kyiv’s greatest membership would place Ukraine on track to comprehend an aspiration that would have been out of access for the former Soviet republic ahead of the Russian invasion.

“Entire generations fought for a chance to escape from the jail of the Soviet Union and, like a absolutely free chook, to fly to European civilisation,” the speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, mentioned in a assertion.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaus and Maria Starkova Producing by Cynthia Osterman Enhancing by Lincoln Feast.)